Non-fiction 2 (YTD 54)
Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, by Brendan Simms
The Great Transformation, by Karen Armstrong

Non-genre fiction 3 (YTD 39)
Silas Marner, by George Eliot
Set in Darkness, by Ian Rankin
The Shell Seekers, by Rosamunde Pilcher

SF (not Who) 5 (YTD 60)
A Wizard Abroad, by Diane Duane
Visions of Wonder, ed. David Hartwell and Milton Wolf
Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Blue Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Doctor Who (excluding comics) 5 (YTD 51)
Doctor Who Annual 1974
Festival of Death, by Jonathan Morris
Dreamstone Moon, by Paul Leonard
The Story of Martha, by Dan Abnett
Doctor Who Annual 1975

Comics 2 (YTD 14)
Daredevil: Wake Up, by Brian Michael Bendis and David Mack
The Only Good Dalek by Justin Richards and Mike Collins

4/17 (YTD 46/219) by women (Armstrong, Eliot, Pilcher, Duane)
0/17 (YTD 16/219) by PoC
10 owned for more than a year (Mars trilogy [reread], Unfinest Hour [reread], Visions of Wonder, Dreamstone Moon, The Shell Seekers, Set in Darkness, A Wizard Abroad, The Story of Martha)
4 rereads (YTD 21/219)
~6,300 pages (YTD ~69,400)

This is the first Doctor Who graphic novel to be officially produced by the BBC, using the talents of Justin Richards who is currently the most prolific of Who authors, and Mike Collins who is the main artist of the comic strips in Doctor Who Magazine. It’s a pretty good effort; the new-style iDaleks are brought together with some staples of Dalek history (petrified forest, Varga plants, Robomen, Ogrons) and there is an actual plot with twists and things, as well as some cute Eleven / Amy moments, skilfully illustrated by Collins. If the BBC planned this as the first of a new range of DW graphic novels, they are off to a good start.

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broadcast anniversaries

30 September 1967: broadcast of first episode of The Abominable Snowmen. The Tardis lands in Tibet; the Doctor is captured by the monks of Det-Sen monastery at the urging of Travers who thinks he is a rival researcher. Meanwhile Jamie and Victoria go exploring in the caves…

30 September 1978: broadcast of first episode of The Pirate Planet. The Doctor and Romana, aiming for the planet Calufrax, discover instead that they are on the mining world of Zanak where the Captain and the Mentiads are in conflict.

I spotted what seemed to me a vaguely familiar name in the news in the last couple of days, and emailed a friend who was in the next generation of student hacks after me to ask him if he remembered a Justine Thornton from our Cambridge days. He replied saying that she had been editor of Varsity at one point, and that she had also briefly been his girlfriend. Why was I asking, he wondered? Had she applied for a job with me or something? He hadn’t heard of her in fifteen years.

So I sent him this link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/26/miliband-personal-life-political

It’s a small world sometimes.

Since Jennie, alas, seems not to have got sufficient nominations for the post of President of the Liberal Democrats, I can declare that I’m pretty sure I’ll be voting for Tim Farron, MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale. I knew Tim back when we were both student Lib Dem politicos and he (utterly against the odds) got elected to the NUS National Executive in a straw poll of NUS Conference (the runner-up in that vote, Lorna Fitzsimons, has been and gone as a Labour MP in the years since). Tim was eloquent and fiery then, and as far as I can tell he remains eloquent and fiery now. People may object that he is using the presidency of the party as a step to greater prominence, but there is no harm in that if he will do the job right, of representing the membership as a whole internally, and I rather think he will.

I have nothing against the other candidate, Susan Kramer, except that I don’t know her. I think she will suffer from being a metropolitan London candidate, even though she is no longer an MP while Tim is. (Looking at the map, Tim and I live almost exactly the same distance from London.) For what it’s worth, I think her opening statement, warning against unspecified sources of division, is weaker than Tim’s, where he promises to be a ‘critical friend’ of the coalition. And when Tim promises to ‘be a distinctive voice’ in his headline, nobody who knows him can doubt that he will deliver.

broadcast anniversaries

29 September 1979: broadcast of first episode of City of Death. The Doctor and Romana are in Paris, and get mixed up with Duggan the detective and Count and Countess Scarlioni. But the Count is more than he seems…

29 September 2007: broadcast of both episodes of The Last Sontaran, starting Season 2 of the Sarah Jane Adventures. A surviving Sontaran from The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky tries to destroy human life on Earth, but is thwarted by Sarah Jane, Luke, Clyde and Maria. But (sob!) Maria is moving to America and we won’t see much more of her.

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This is a rather brave attempt to wring significance out of the fact that Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates and Jeremiah all lived at about the same time, between them causing a revolution in the way in which humans relate to the universe in philosophy and religion. It did not completely work for me. I found Armstrong’s account of the evolution of the Old Testament as a product of the Jews’ exile in Babylon pretty compelling, and we have a couple more of her books on the shelves which I am looking forward to reading now. Her description of ancient Greek thought, which I gave tutorials on many years ago, seemed decent enough and made a very interesting claim about the importance of Sophocles in particular and Greek theatre in general as giving people a new way to talk about and think about the world. But her Indian sections were rather dull, and her Chinese sections very dull indeed, coming alive respectively only with the appearance of the main characters, the Buddha and Confucius. It is my fault more than hers, but I felt completely adrift in Chinese geography; various kingdoms with unfamiliar and confusingly similar names, and no obvious relationship to the present day geography which I know a little better.

And I was not convinced by the book’s overall thesis, which seems to be that the near-coincidence of lifespan of the four main characters is a particularly interesting fact. It is true, but rather dull, to note, for instance, that James Marsters and Sophie Aldred were born on the same day. I think it is a little more interesting that Alexander Hamilton and the Duchess of Devonshire were born and died within two years of each other, because both were engaged in politics, and particularly in relations between England and America, at the same time. But Armstrong doesn’t seriously argue that there was any influence, or even much in the way of common roots, between her four main characters, so we get four completely different stories (only two of which are interesting) chopped across each other with various totally disparate incidents lumped together purely because they happened at roughly the same time. It did not really work for me.

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Looking through my backlist, this tends to be mainstream fiction books which I bought because I knew a lot of other people had read them, but did not expect to finish with more than just being able to tick the box. In particular, as I look at the two recently read books that seem to me my best answers to this question, they are both books where the title was misleadingly boring, and I didn’t know anything about the plot before starting to read.

Most recent (actually only read a couple of weeks ago) is Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers, which I imagined would be about gormlessly wistful people on a quest through the decades for, er, shells of some kind, probably the marine variety. But in fact The Shell Seekers turns out to be an oil painting; and although the central character is indeed one of the eponymous seekers, it’s a scene from the beginning of her life, and not really one that dominates her; indeed her decisive moment comes when she gets rid of the painting entirely. And the book was generally a much better read thanh I had anticipated.

Last year’s find in a similar vein was Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which I vaguely knew was about someone with a blurry gender identity but kind of expected would be set in a gritty American location called Middlesex, or worse still in the English region of northwest London which formerly had the same name. But it was an exuberant tale of immigration and conflict and family drama, which I enjoyed very much as a tale in itself.

So, while the cliche is that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t always judge a book by its title either.

Day 01 – Your favourite series of books (with more than 3 in the series)
Day 02 – A book that you wish more people had read
Day 03 – Your favorite recent book
Day 04 – Your favorite book ever
Day 05 – A book you hate
Day 06 – Your favourite writer
Day 07 – A writer you don’t like
Day 08 – Your favourite work in translation
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – An book you’ve read more than twice
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book
Day 14 – Favorite male character
Day 15 – Favorite female character
Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure book
Day 17 – Favorite trilogy or tetralogy
Day 18 – Favorite book cover
Day 19 – Best ensemble of characters in a book
Day 20 – Favorite kiss or love scene
Day 21 – Favorite fictional romantic relationship
Day 22 – Favorite ending/climax
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A book you plan on reading
Day 26 – OMG WTF? plot
Day 27 – Favourite non-mainstream writer
Day 28 – First book obsession
Day 29 – Current book obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death

I first encountered the Mars books when I moved to Bosnia in early 1997, and for me they are forever associated with my own discovery of a completely different country and lifestyle, where I too was at long distance from my home base, exploring territory for myself in detail and learning new and exciting things every day (with fatherhood also imminent). So it was pleasant to return to those heady days as I reread the three books this month.

Worth it for other reasons as well. I think the Mars books are among the best examples of sfnal world-building, combined with politics, that I know; without needing a detailed knowledge of Martian geography in advance (the maps supplied are adequate for me) I got a tremendous sense of the scale and size of the planet, of the vast enterprise of making it livable, not a new Earth, but a new Mars. And Robinson raises questions about the political management of the environment and the wider economy on the new planet which certainly have resonances for our own time and place.

Red Mars

Each of the books has a couple of iconic moments which linger in the memory, and in Red Mars these are the deaths of the two leaders of the first colonising expedition, rivals both for political command and for Maya Totovna: John Boone, murdered at the direction of Frank Chalmers, in the first chapter (though the rest of the book starts from the colonists’ landing, decades before), and then at the end of the book Chalmers’ own demise, swept away by an ice flow in the geological and political turbulence of 2061. It’s a story of growing tension between those who live on and love the planet and the insensitivity and eventual violence of the Earth-based authorities who try to control them, told from the viewpoints of different individuals among the First Hundred settlers, with a build up to catastrophe at the end. (Other memorable moments: the debate between Sax Russell and Ann Clayborne which sets the political context for the next couple of books; Arkady’s horrifying fate; and the fall of the great space elevator.)

Red Mars won the Nebula for 1993, beating Assemblers of Infinity by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, Hard Landing by Algis Budrys, Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress and Nightside the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe, none of which I have read (though I did read the original Kress novella). It was beaten for the Hugo by Doomsday Book and A Fire Upon The Deep.

Green Mars

Green Mars probably works best of the three as a standalone novel. We start with Nirgal, a viewpoint character from the second generation, growing up with a group of colonists in hiding since the 2061 catastrophe, experiencing the planet’s puberty as he experiences his own (the key scene of the opening section is where he and the slightly older Jackie make love in the open air, once the temperature and pressure are high enough that they can do so). The book is very much the story of an underground movement plotting revolution – the usual excitements of sleeping with the enemy and subsequent capture, allies from Earth (a Soros-type billionaire who gets involved), plotting and planning the political and ecological principles of the society they want to build, and then seizing the moment for change when it arrives: the key scene at the end is Maya’s taking command of the rebels from Jackie at the moment of victory, though a key symbolic moment is the flooding of the city of Burroughs by saboteurs and the evacuation of its population, made possible by changes in the Martian atmosphere, leading to a procession of people walking out their bubble and into a new world, which is another striking image.

Green Mars was beaten for the Nebula by Greg Bear’s Moving Mars (with which it shares some themes), but won the Hugo against Moving Mars, Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress, Glory Season by David Brin, and Virtual Light by William Gibson. I’ve read the Gibson but not the Brin or the full version of the Kress.

Blue Mars

Blue Mars is a series of explorations of what happened next, what happened elsewhere, to the characters of the first two volumes. We get excursions to Earth and to the rest of the Solar System, with a mention of interstellar colonisation; we get constitution-building, explorations of the new planet and the new society that Mars has become. But it is also about death. The two killer moments in the book are, first, after Nirgal has set up and started cultivating his own little garden crater, filling it with plants and wildlife, showing it off to his friends, the whole lovingly described enterprise is wiped out in a sandstorm. No human character is even injured in the incident, but it is still tremendously sad. Second, as part of his scientific hand-waving to allow the same cast to witness all the stages of Martian terraforming, Robinson has gifted his characters with longevity. But this starts to run out after a while, and the suriving members of the First Hundred begin to die, one by one; the crucial moment comes when Maya fails to recognise a photograph of her long-ago lover, Frank Chalmers – a scene told from her point of view and then again from the viewpoints of those around her. The book, which has had a lot of death in it, ends with a summoning of lost memories, a reunion of survivors, and a celebration of where they have got to; with mysteries still remaining – for instance, whatever happened to Hiroko?

Blue Mars beat Lois McMaster Bujold’s Memory, Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population, Robert J. Sawyer’s Starplex and Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire for the Hugo. I loved the Bujold and have read the Sterling (though don’t remember much about it), and have no inclination to try the other two. Rather surprisingly it didn’t even make the Nebula shortlist; in some ways I find it the most Nebula-ish of the three, and Red Mars, which did win the Nebula and not the Hugo, seems to me actually the most Hugo-ish. But there you are.

This is not really a 2000 page novel spilt in three. I think the first two books, Red Mars and Green Mars, work well enough both as individual novels and considered as a unit; if Robinson had ended the story at that point it would have been perfectly satisfactory. Probably the best book of the three considered individually is the middle volume, Green Mars, which is not the traditional setup for trilogies. Looking back at what I have written here, I note also that Green Mars is the one book of the three where the most memorable passages are not about death but about life. But I think Blue Mars is a satisfying completion of the trilogy (especially if considered with the spinoff collection of short stories, The Martians).

I don’t know how many of you, like me, were greeted when logging into LJ today with an irritating banner across the bottom of the browser window calling itself “LJTimes” and flashing much useful information, all in Russian. If you want to get rid of it, just go here and make sure that the last box (“Cyrillic Services” – “Opt me into services originally developed for the Cyrillic users”) is unchecked.

i) births and deaths

28 September 1919: birth of Terence Dudley who directed Meglos (1980) and wrote Four to Doomsday (1982), Black Orchid (1982) and The King’s Demons (1983).

28 September 1937: birth of Donald Gee, who played Major Ian Warne in The Space Pirates (1969) and Eckersley in The Monster of Peladon (1974).

28 September 1986: death of Denis Carey, who played Professor Chronotis in Shada (unbroadcast but would have been 1980), the Keeper in The Keeper of Traken (1981), and the Old Man in Timelash (1985).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

28 September 1968: broadcast of third episode of The Mind Robber, where Jamie turns back into himself, and the team meet Rapunzel, the Minotaur and the Medusa.

28 September 1987: broadcast of fourth and final episode of Time and the Rani. The Doctor defeats the Rani and rescues the kidnapped geniuses.

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i) births and deaths

27 September 1921: birth of Milton Subotsky, who produced and wrote Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966), the two cinema films starring Peter Cushing as Doctor Who.

27 September 2000: death of Daphne Dare, who did costumes for most of the first four seasons of Old Who.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

27 September 1975: broadcast of first episode of Planet of Evil. The Doctor and Sarah land on Zeta Minor and are captured by the crew of a Morestran space ship, who have been mysteriously losing team members to an ‘orrible invisible monster…

27 September 1980: broadcast of first episode of Meglos. The Doctor and Romana materialise in the Prion system, but are trapped in a chronic hysteresis loop while Meglos, an evil cactus, plans to take over the planet of Tigella with the help of the Gaztaks, some passing space pirates.

27 September 1986: broadcast of fourth episode of The Mysterious Planet (ToaTL #4). It all goes bang, really.

27 September 1989: broadcast of fourth episode of Battlefield. Morgaine frees the Destroyer, but the Brigadier shoots it with silver bullets, and Morgaine surrenders to UNIT; the girls go out for a night on the town in Bessie.

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The Sack of Rome.

I had thought I would try and get into the habit of posting about each new Doctor Who audio play as I finished them, but the hectic events of the last couple of weeks meant that this was one intention that fell by the wayside. Three new Big Finish audios to write up, then, and the new Fourth Doctor play from the BBC. As usual I’m doing them in internal continuity order.

In timely fashion, just as I had finished watching her original televised stories (and just as she is about to return ass a guest in Sarah Jane), Jo Grant appears on Big Finish in a new Companion Chronicle, Find and Replace, encountering not only Iris Wildthyme (a disreputable Time Lady who is also played by Katy Manning) but also Huxley, one of the Novelisors of Verbatim Six (who previously appeared in Ringpullworld, a Turlough Companion Chronicle from earlier this year). Being an Iris story it is by Paul Magrs, and as often with his stories I found it a slightly mixed bag – some really wonderful character moments for both Jo and Iris, and lovely nods to nostalgia, but the plot a little confused and the means and motivation for, of all people, the Third Doctor not really satisfying. It would not really be penetrable for listeners unfamiliar with Iris as a character.

It’s Paul Magrs again, having been given a second commission to write a set of Fourth Doctor plays for the BBC. It seems that Susan Jameson’s Mrs Wibbsey, the Doctor’s housekeeper in his country retreat, is likely to be the companion figure this time, which is good as she is far more interesting than Richard Franklin’s reprise of Mike Yates (who appears briefly as an answerphone message). Demon Quest: The Relics of Time begins at a village fete where Mrs Wibbsey, somewhat improbably, has traded some vital Tardis components for several pieces of paper which show the Fourth Doctor appearing in various historical settings; they then travel back to Roman Britain (one for my classicist friends!) to find out who has been making mosaics showing the Doctor’s face. It’s slightly confusing, and I’m not wild about the Doctor as eccentric country gentleman (which of course is Baker’s own persona these days), but shows some promise for the next four episodes; the next will be set in late 19th century Paris.

The Cradle of the Snake is the best of this month’s audios. Marc Platt (who else?) brings back the Mara, with the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, and Turlough visiting Manussa (setting of Snakedance) to try and set Tegan straight after Nyssa and Turlough stupidly interrupt the Doctor’s attempts to cure her of her snakey problems. I think the story is totally accessible to those who do not know either Kinda or Snakedance, or even much about Who; Peter Davison is called on to act well outside his usual comfort zone and succeeds; Platt is on form; the guest cast are good (including Vernon Dobtcheff, who was in The War Games over forty years ago, and Madeleine Potter, an American who seemed surprisingly at home in this rather British setting); and we are all set for another three stories (at least) with this particular Team Tardis next year.

Having said that I like The Cradle of the Snake best of this month’s audios, I think Project: Destiny by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright is pretty good as well, though you would need to be familiar with quite a lot of the previous Big Finish range to appreciate it fully – I went back and listened again to Project: Twilight and Project: Lazarus, which feature Hex’s mother Cassie, and also to The Harvest, which introduces him and the hospital of St Gart’s to which we now return, and even his most recent appearance in The Angel of Scutari, but I should have also taken in No Man’s Land and maybe even Thicker Than Water. (Mind you, those are almost all excellent stories, so perhaps make a decent listening project as such.) Poor old Hex finds that the hospital and indeed London have been taken over by sinister external forces, and that the Doctor has known more about his background than he was letting on for a very long time; meanwhile the sinister Nimrod, leader of The Forge, a Torchwood-like research centre but much less sexy, is maturing his own evil plans. It’s very well executed, and again the guest cast are on top of things. I was rather hoping that it would all turn out to be a dream at one point, but in fact am content with the way it works out.

So in summary: The Cradle of the Snake is excellent and will appeal to anyone with even the vaguest notion of the Fifth Doctor era; Project: Destiny is also very good but more for those who know a lot of the previous Big Finish plays; Find and Replace has its moments; and Demon Quest: The Relics of Time fills up an hour without causing offence.

I am saving some of these for later days, so here I just want to briefly salute the hilariously disastrous dinner party which takes place half way through Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign. Really, explaining it takes too long; it’s the high point of a very entertaining book.

“Pym!” The Countess spotted a new victim, and her voice went a little dangerous. “I seconded you to look after Miles. Would you care to explain this scene?”
There was a thoughtful pause. In a voice of simple honesty, Pym replied, “No, Milady.”

Day 01 – Your favourite series of books (with more than 3 in the series)
Day 02 – A book that you wish more people had read
Day 03 – Your favorite recent book
Day 04 – Your favorite book ever
Day 05 – A book you hate
Day 06 – Your favourite writer
Day 07 – A writer you don’t like
Day 08 – Your favourite work in translation
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – An book you’ve read more than twice
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book
Day 14 – Favorite male character
Day 15 – Favorite female character
Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure book
Day 17 – Favorite trilogy or tetralogy
Day 18 – Favorite book cover
Day 19 – Best ensemble of characters in a book
Day 20 – Favorite kiss or love scene
Day 21 – Favorite fictional romantic relationship
Day 22 – Favorite ending/climax
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A book you plan on reading
Day 26 – OMG WTF? plot
Day 27 – Favourite non-mainstream writer
Day 28 – First book obsession
Day 29 – Current book obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death

Like a lot of other people, I was saddened and disgusted by Elizabeth Moon’s recent comments on Islam. (For those who don’t know about this: Moon, a fairly prominent writer of what is generally termed ‘military sf’, who also won a Nebula award for a novel about autism, wrote a rambling and offensive screed about the duties of Muslims in the US to be more sensitive to people like her if they want to be worthy of citizenship, let alone building places of worship in downtown New York, because of what a small number of their co-religionists from outside the US did nine years ago. I won’t link to it but if you haven’t seen it it won’t be difficult to find.)

For me, of course, it rang a particular bell; quite apart from my sympathy with my Muslim friends and relatives who have to put up with this kind of thing day in day out, I am not unacquainted with the position of being in a minority group, seeing people parading outside my front door celebrating that they are more equal citizens than I am, and accused of being a supporter of terrorism on the grounds of my religious background. It was not very difficult for me to read Moon’s piece and mentally substitute ‘Catholic’ or ‘Irish’ where she put ‘Muslim’, with the context switched to the other side of the Atlantic.

(And while I know some readers sympathised with, and possibly even participated in, the recent protests against the Pope’s visit to the UK, I hope they were wary of the company they were keeping. I don’t like Benedict XVI much, but I don’t like bigotry either. The always readable Laurie Penny has a very sane leftist take on the affair.)

Anyway, another parallel suggested itself to me reading the various views about Moon’s proposed attendance at WisCon 2011 as one of its Guests of Honour. WisCon proudly proclaims itself as a ‘Feminist sf convention’ and the organising committee quickly moved to distance themselves from Moon’s remarks, though without formally withdrawing the invitation; the other guest of honour has appealed to those who were offended by Moon’s remarks to attend the convention anyway.

It reminded me of the incident about a year ago when a friend of mine was actually banned from his local sf convention (no links; those who were involved will certainly remember the incident I’m talking about which got a lot of coverage online at the time). That seemed to me a fairly clear case of a decision which was bad and wrong: no reason was formally given for the banning, though there were dark mutterings about events two years previously (which, as I had in fact been present myself on that occasion, did not seem to me an adequate explanation). While the convention were clearly within their rights to ban anyone they wished not to see, the decision did not seem fair or justified and damaged their reputation. In the end the ban was rescinded and a public statement of reconciliation made by both sides.

But it did make me consider the question of what level of misbehaviour should be sufficient to make such a decision fair or justified. It’s a slightly different topic, but I remember two friends of mine disinviting someone from their wedding at the last minute because he had grossly offended them in the pub the night before. That seemed to me fair and justified. If I were the WisCon committee, I would consider Moon’s behaviour to be of that order of gravity; a decision to remove her Guest of Honour status would seem fair and justified to me, and would not damage WisCon’s reputation. Indeed as things stand, the only justification I can see for their not taking that decision is the hope that Moon will issue some adequate apology for and withdrawal of her remarks.

Of course, this is commentary from another continent from someone who wasn’t likely to attend WisCon anyway (my only con this year was DiscWorld – had hoped to go to BeneluxCon down the road in Antwerp but must now travel that weekend), and I’m sure that those concerned will give my views the attention they deserve. But I have certainly had the experience of deliberately deciding not to attend particular events because of wanting to avoid other people who I knew would be present, and I feel very much for those who were looking forward to next year’s WisCon and now are not. Moon’s co-Guest of Honour hopes that “Elizabeth Moon will have things to say to the community at large, and apologies to deliver”. Well, we’ll see.

births and deaths

26 September 1909: birth of Leonard Sachs, who played Admiral de Coligny in The Massacre (1966) and President Borusa in Arc of Infinity (1983)

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This is a slightly difficult question to answer. Looking through my LibraryThing catalogue (yet again) I find I have given five stars to the following books originally published in languages other than English:

Albanian: The File on H
Anglo-Saxon: Beowulf
Chinese: Wild Swans
Dutch: The Diary of Anne Frank
French: Persepolis I, Persepolis II, Candide, Madame Bovary, Proust I, Proust III, Proust VI, The Little Prince
German: Ali and Nino (as mentioned previously)
Greek: Oedipus Rex, The Iliad
Icelandic: Njal’s Saga
Italian: Survival in Auschwitz, The Divine Comedy
Latin: Ovid’s Erotic Poems, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Twelve Cæsars
Portuguese: Blindness
Russian: The Master and Margarita
Serbian: Impossible Stories

I guess the most impressive translation of those above is Heaney’s Beowulf, because it is such a different worldview that he is trying to convey and yet remain faithful to the spirit of the original. But in a sense it is a mere detail that the books are translated. We’re always approaching literature on the basis of our own experiences, rather than the author’s, so every reading is a translation across human experience.

I do have two other approaches to literature in translation. One is to simply buy a book that I already know well in a language that I want to learn; I can’t say I have done this often but there are a couple of translated Zelazny and Tolkien volumes in French and Dutch on the shelves (and a Serbian Autostoperski vodič kroz galaksiju by ‘Daglas Adams’, which I haven’t read).

The other is the Bible, where there are so many translations available that I can try several different versions and see if I feel I can get closer to the original text despite my minimal Greek and non-existent Hebrew. I’ve written before on, for instance, the subtle distinction between ἐκθαμβέω in Mark 16.6 and φοβέω in Mark 16.8. Here’s another one: One of the most evocative single verses of the Old Testament for me is Ecclesiastes 11.1, which in the King James version is translated ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.’ I have no idea how close this is to the Hebrew ‘שלח לחמך על פני המים כי ברב הימים תמצאנו׃’ and I note with interest that while the original המים seems to just mean ‘water’, the Greek version has “on the surface of the water” (ἐπὶ πρόσωπον τοῦ ὕδατος) and the Latin “on the running waters” (super transeuntes aquas), and various translators have chosen to go with the Latin or Greek development of the original (rather than, as King James’s team did, sticking to the original in this case). But we will never quite capture the meaning of the precious water, and the risky act of casting valuable foodstuffs onto it, to the parched agriculturalists of the 4th century before our era. Edited to add: nor will any translation ever catch the resonance between “המים” (waters) and “הימים” (days).

(And the unspeakable Good News Bible has ‘Invest your money in foreign trade, and one of these days you will make a profit.’ I kid you not.)

My day job is full of translations of which I am unaware – I am fortunate to operate in a multinational, multicultural environment where the main operating language is my native one. So it is easy to forget how fortunate I am, and answering this question has helped remind me.

Day 01 – Your favourite series of books (with more than 3 in the series)
Day 02 – A book that you wish more people had read
Day 03 – Your favorite recent book
Day 04 – Your favorite book ever
Day 05 – A book you hate
Day 06 – Your favourite writer
Day 07 – A writer you don’t like
Day 08 – Your favourite work in translation
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – An book you’ve read more than twice
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book
Day 14 – Favorite male character
Day 15 – Favorite female character
Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure book
Day 17 – Favorite trilogy or tetralogy
Day 18 – Favorite book cover
Day 19 – Best ensemble of characters in a book
Day 20 – Favorite kiss or love scene
Day 21 – Favorite fictional romantic relationship
Day 22 – Favorite ending/climax
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A book you plan on reading
Day 26 – OMG WTF? plot
Day 27 – Favourite non-mainstream writer
Day 28 – First book obsession
Day 29 – Current book obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death

Went to see B this morning, who was very chirpy and apparently has been notably so since her exciting stay in hospital. We had a fun walk round the pools at Hélécine, and got back in time for her rather early lunch.

On my way home I took advantage of the good weather and tried to get some decent pictures of one of the local ancient religious sites. It is an odd little chapel, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ten-Steen (“Our Lady of the Stone”) on the outskirts of Tienen. My first picture was certainly the best, capturing it from the south against a partly cloudy but bright sky:

In the above picture you can just about see the Stone for which the church was named at the bottom left of the back of the building. I went for a close-up picture, where you can see it nestling discreetly in a bed of plants (would be interested to know what plants). The first time I went there I bumped into one of the locals, and asked him if the stone had had any religious significance. He flatly denied the possibility; it might, he said vaguely, have been a totally non-religious boundary marker in ancient times, for the point where three tribes’ territories met. Yeah, right.

The Baroque door to the church has the date of its construction, 1699, written over it (should just about be visible in the picture below). I suspect that like our own local church (picture in the icon for this post) some of the fabric is a good deal older than that; there is known to have been a chapel on the site in 1331, part of a leper asylum, and there are legends of Benedictines and virgins from much earlier. Of course, the presence of the Stone suggests a much longer tradition.

The inside of the church is maintained by an ancient confraternity, and the main nave is dominated by a portrait of the confraternity’s members in the eighteenth century – badly restored and due to the lighting impossible to photograph, so you’ll have to take my word for it that that is what is on the left here:

But the side chapel is the more interesting bit of the internal fabric – dedicated to St Maurus, who is supposed to have introduced Benedictine practices into ancient Gaul. This is fairly dubious. St Maurus’ personal connections with this particular part of Gaul are pretty minimal, and I must assume that he has taken over the job of the pre-Christian local deity. (Though the church was apparently originally founded by Benedictines, so I may be being unfair.)

Most remarkably, St Maurus, at least in the Church of Our Lady of the Stone, cures mental disorders (which in Dutch are referred to as “geestelijke stoornissen”, which could be also translated as “spiritual disturbances”). At his feet are a set of iron crowns, which if worn by sufferers who are performing the correct ritual, may offer relief.

It is interesting that this altar is set against the inside of the same wall against which the ancient Stone leans on the outside. I also find it an interesting coincidence that Tienen is home to the Delacroix foundation which cares for those with very serious mental handicaps, including my own daughter B. It would seem that there was a local tradition of involvement long before the Delacroix family took action in 1950.

That’s not all. Every January 16, pilgrims assemble and walk thirteen times between the Church of Our Lady of the Stone and the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Hakendover, the next village. This commemorates the legend that at the end of the seventh century, three Hakendover virgins decided to build a church dedicated to the Redeemer, a process which involved various miraculous occurrences (a bird bringing them a letter from God to show where the church should be built, Jesus himself turning up to help the construction process, local bishops being struck down by God for their arrogance, etc). The virgins are supposedly buried at Our Lady of the Stone. (And that’s not to mention the curious Easter Monday ritual with horses that takes place in Hakendover, which is another story.) Here is a copy of a 1909 picture of the January pilgrimage, displayed in the church:

Belgium is nominally a traditionally Christian and Catholic country; but a lot of local cult practices have much more ancient roots.

broadcast anniversaries

25 September 1965: broadcast of “Air Lock”, third episode of the story we now call Galaxy 4. Vicki is captured by the Rills, but persuades the Doctor to help them; Steven is threatened with asphyxiation by the Drahvins.

25 September 1976: broadcast of fourth episode of The Masque of Mandragora. The brotherhood attempt to infiltrate the masque at the gathering of Renaissance savants, but the Doctor and Sarah foil their plan.

• Can this be right? « Slugger O'Toole
  Fianna Fail 22%, Fine Gael 30%, Labour 35%!!!!
  Greens 2%, Sinn Fein 4%, Independents 8%; looks like we may see a Labour Taoiseach…
  (tags: ireland)
• Birth Pains as Southern Sudan Preps for Nationhood
  Excellent if slightly grim photo-essay from Time
  (tags: sudan)
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• British SF Masterworks redux « It Doesn't Have To Be Right…
  Ian Sales comes up with a list of 55 (strictly 75) classic sf books by British writers. Includes Bob Shaw, James White and Ian McDonald, but nobody from the Republic as far as I could tell.
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  Civilian control of the military – nice idea in theory, not actually practiced in Washington
  (tags: usa war afghanistan)
• YouTube – Endhiran Theatrical trailer
  That new Indian robot film – looks rather amazing!
  (tags: films)

I’ve given a partial answer to this with the earlier question about books I hateDoctor Who – The Twin Dilemma and Doctor Who – Slipback are simply dire. There is admittedly more merit in his Doctor Who and the Visitation, which I think may have been written first, before he thought he knew what he was doing.

Nigel Robinson deserves some credit for his editorial and political skills in keeping the Doctor Who books going over the years. Unfortunately he is a bad writer; there is no way to sweeten the pill. His novelisations of The Underwater Menace, The Sensorites and The Edge of Destruction, while admittedly not working with the best material of the black-and-white era, add nothing to the stories seen on screen; his early New Adventure novel is one of the worst of that sequence; his two recent Companion Chronicles have been underwhelming. I will admit that I thought he did better with his novelisation of The Time Meddler, but that was a richer seam.

Keith Topping wrote two of my least favourite Who Books, the Telos novella Ghost Ship which is the weakest of a range which was not terribly strong, and Byzantium! which has utterly anachronistic minarets in the city now known as Istanbul, in a story set 250 years before it became Constantinople. I have a couple of non-fiction books on the shelves co-authored by him, which are a bit better, but my suspicion is that he is simply a dreadful fiction writer. Seeing his name on the spine or front cover of a book would certainly determine me not to buy it.

This seems a bit ungracious of me. I should say that most authors who I have met or interacted with in person have been pretty charming, even if I don’t actually like their writing and have said so in public; and I want to give a particular shout-out to Catherine Asaro, towards whose writing I have been consistently hostile, but who chose to engage me with grace and generosity (though I’m afraid it didn’t change my take on her work).

That was a difficult one (as demonstrated by the fact that it took me an extra day). The next questions are much easier.

Day 01 – Your favourite series of books (with more than 3 in the series)
Day 02 – A book that you wish more people had read
Day 03 – Your favorite recent book
Day 04 – Your favorite book ever
Day 05 – A book you hate
Day 06 – Your favourite writer
Day 07 – A writer you don’t like
Day 08 – Your favourite work in translation
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – An book you’ve read more than twice
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book
Day 14 – Favorite male character
Day 15 – Favorite female character
Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure book
Day 17 – Favorite trilogy or tetralogy
Day 18 – Favorite book cover
Day 19 – Best ensemble of characters in a book
Day 20 – Favorite kiss or love scene
Day 21 – Favorite fictional romantic relationship
Day 22 – Favorite ending/climax
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A book you plan on reading
Day 26 – OMG WTF? plot
Day 27 – Favourite non-mainstream writer
Day 28 – First book obsession
Day 29 – Current book obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death

Planet of the Daleks is one of the rare cases where my opinion of the story has dropped largely as a result of watching it in sequence. Picked randomly out of a set of Old Who stories, it seems inoffensive enough; but eight years on from The Daleks’ Master Plan, it’s more obviously a rehash of Terry Nation’s previous Dalek stories, combining various elements from them without bringing much new to it, a collage of bits of First Doctor space fantasy except in colour this time. This is the third consecutive future history story (after Carnival of Monsters and Frontier in Space and the least Pertwee-ish of this un-Pertwee-ish format.

Having said that, it’s not all that bad. Katy Manning is actually called on to act a bit more than usual, both bravely coping with the Doctor’s condition and her own fungal problems, and then dealing with Latep’s affections later on, and she rises to the challenge. Bernard Horsfall and Jane How are good as the Thals. The jungle doesn’t look too much like a studio set. But the plot is too padded, and we never find out what happened to the Doctor’s appeal to the Time Lords.

I have a soft spot for The Green Death, which was I think the first Who DVD I bought. Watched in sequence, it is more apparent that the story is Inferno meets The War Machines in Wales. But those were both good stories, and I think Sloman has improved on them – BOSS beats WOTAN any day, and the chemicals causing maggots to mutate is more plausible than people turning into cavemen after touching Schumann’s gas. It is a decently Lettsian political story as well, the pit closures, hippy environmentalists, and subject of Welsh nationalism all making it feel contemporary.

Of the four Old Who companions who get married off (I do not count Peri) Jo gets by far the best closure (and is the only one to end up hitched to a bloke from her own space and time). Episode Three of The Green Death is surely the most erotic of Old Who, with the lovers almost kissing and the cliffhanger of the maggot lustfully approaching Jo’s bared back. And the final shot of the Doctor driving sadly away from Jo’s engagement party, which apparently took four hours to set up, still brings a tear to the eye.

One of the most unexpected results of my rewatchathon has been that I have come round to Jo. In comparison with the rather feisty companions of New Who, she seems both prototype and stereotype; but in fact she is the first proper incarnation of the key female lead, with an intense and personal relationship with the Doctor, intended to be the audience’s main identification figure. It’s a new departure for the programme, and she is the measure that all the others have to match up to (even if, admittedly, many of them do surpass her). Establishing her as a constant, after the fairly rapid turnover of companions in the first seven seasons, was presumably a later decision (she could after all have left in 1971 had she wanted to), but also changed the dynamic and the expectations of future companions’ longevity. The by-product of her presence is of course the downgrading of the importance of the UNIT characters (even as they are increased in strength with Mike Yates and the upgrading of Benton to semi-regular), but in a way that gives us the kind of ensemble basis for the show which New Who has picked up so successfully; by far the most interesting of the new regular characters apart from Jo is the evil Master. It is interesting to note that both Russell T Davies (born April 1963) and Steven Moffat (born December 1961) would have been watching her stories in their formative years.

Jo features in several of my top Who novelisations – Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, Doctor Who and the Dæmons, Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks, Doctor Who and the Three Doctors, Doctor Who and the Space War [Frontier in Space], and Doctor Who and the Green Death. Big Finish’s latest Companion Chronicle, Find and Replace, unites Jo with the disreputable Iris Wildthyme, a renegade Time Lord who claims to be the Doctor’s ex-girlfriend and is also played by Katy Manning, in what is surely going to be one of the classics of the range.

With Jo having acquired extra legitimacy through longevity, The Time Warrior has the difficult task of introducing the first new companion for three years. But it is also the first story with a historical setting since The Highlanders, which incidentally was also the introductory story for a long-lasting companion (Jamie), which in itself is rather a good signal that the show is still capable of pulling surprises (which is just as well, considering the disappointments in store later in the season). The medieval stuff – Dot Cotton and Boba Fett in alliance against the bad guys – is actually rather well done, to the point that you don’t realise that there is only one castle playing two roles. The Sontarans are off to a good start, and there’s a satisfying bang at the end as the castle blows up.

It’s interesting to note that Sarah actually looks rather boyish here – pageboy haircut, understated bust, wearing trousers rather than skirt – which reinforces the point that the companion is meant to be the audience identification figure, and perhaps makes her easier for small boys to relate to than the much more girly Jo would have been. One can’t take this too far – she is certainly femme rather than butch – but it strikes me that after the first seven seasons of regular characters who just happen to be hanging around the Tardis and the Doctor, we have here the consolidation and further development of the Jo Grant dynamic.

One further character note about the Doctor – we have a bit of a reshaping of the role of the Time Lords here, as galactic ticket-inspectors; and this is also the story where the Doctor says he is serious about what he does, but not necessarily the way he does it. Unmoored from the UNIT setting, this is a new Pertwee in some ways, and we are allowed to sympathise with Sarah to a certain extent when she mistakes him for the villain rather than the hero of the story.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs was Malcolm Hulke’s last story for Doctor Who, and it must be said that with the rather central exception of the dinosaurs it is rather good. It is a shame about the dinosaurs, especially the tyrannosaurus / brontosaurus fight in episode 6 which is a real low point. The assembly of talent among the guest cast is excellent – Martin Jarvis, Peter Miles, Carmen Silvera, John Bennett, Noel Johnson, all had been on Who before and/or would be again, and all take it seriously (I guess they coudn’t see the dinosaurs for the most part).

Hulke takes it seriously too; his sympathies are of course with the New Earth folks, but his message is one of working for revolution and change within the system. Mike Yates’ treachery is the most interesting thing that has been done with a regular character since Katarina and Sara were killed off. It’s a shame that Richard Franklin never quite rises to the challenge, but it twists Hulke’s narrative from being a relatively safe tale of rooting out the dodgy bits of the establishment to a nasty one where your own household may turn against you.

Sarah and the Doctor are awfully cuddly now, especially in their exchange about Florana at the end! NB that this is the second story in a row about bad guys using time travel to transport their innocent pawns between different periods of Earth history.

With Death to the Daleks we have our second Terry Nation story of this half-dozen. It is actually rather similar to Planet of the Daleks, in that it feels like it has escaped from the Hartnell era (except for the music, on which more below), but the good bits are better and the bad bits are worse. On the good side, the plot is considerably more original than PotD, with the Daleks losing power and being forced to cooperate with the Doctor and the crashed humans, and finding themselves equally under threat from the creepy cultists. Good old John Abineri is there, and Duncan Lamont is great as the grizzled and ultimately self-sacrificing Galloway, likewise Arnold Yarrow as Bellal (and I wonder what happened to Joy Harrison who played Jill Tarrant).

But, but… the music. It’s really bad. I can’t remember anything this bad since The Chase which similarly had experimental scoring and Daleks, but unlike this story The Chase was actually meant to be funny. I’m sure you can do good music for Doctor Who with saxophones, and I know that Carey Blyton did better on both Doctor Who and the Silurians and Revenge of the Cybermen, but it utterly fails to come together here. The worst is the comedy horror leitmotif for the Daleks themselves, but it’s all pretty awful.

Also, the puzzle traps in the living city are very poor. The first one appears to be a simple spot-the-difference test; the maze which is the only way out of the room filled with skeletons doesn’t seem so very difficult (certainly the Daleks solve it pretty fast); and the floor game is just silly. A further minor gripe: Sarah’s bikini is not terribly sexy (though of course that is no crime) and I think that there must still be an Exxilon or two wandering around the Tardis.

The Monster of Peladon is a set of good-ish concepts that fails to be the sum of its parts. Sarah’s attempts to educate Queen Thalira in feminism seem awfully earnest now, but probably sounded more startling at the time; the theme of the miners revolting actually reflected what was happening in Britain at the time, when the Prime Minister of the day went to the polls on the slogan, ‘Who governs Britain?’ and the voters replied ‘Not you, mate!’ The resolution of the political plot also turns out to be a bit of Cold War style politics with Eckersley exposed as the proxy for the other superpower. And Pertwee gets a dress rehearsal for dying in the next story.

But it doesn’t really work well, and it’s the third story in a row for which this is the case. There’s a bit of a feeling of the old team running out of steam (though the chemistry between Pertwee and Sladen remains charming and totally believable). The Doctor gets most un-Doctorishly bloodthirsty when he starts disintegrating Ice Warriors left, right and centre. While some of the guest cast (notably Donald Gee as Eckersley and the Ice Warriors themselves) are rather good, Nina Thomas’s Queen Thalira is very flat indeed (with her shoulders permanently pulled up to her ears, she reminds me rather of Diana Spencer in that awful pre-wedding interview in 1981). And I think I watched the second episode but don’t remember anything about it, and suspect it may not have been necessary to the plot. Not the only Pertwee story that would have been better at two-thirds the length, but one of the best examples of the phenomenon.

So there we are – tantalisingly one story away from the next regeneration. My opinion of The Time Warrior has been raised by watching it in sequence, because of the refreshing reboot of the Doctor/companion relationship; my opinion of Planet of the Daleks, on the other hand, has been lowered. I think I also appreciate the good points of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and deplore the weaknesses of Death to the Daleks, a little more as a result of watching this.

I am now 46% through the Old Who stories, 53% by screen minutes, 54% by episodes, and 40% of the time from November 1963 to December 1989 has elapsed. (The half-way mark in screen minutes is, I think, during episode 1 of The Time WarriorPlanet of the Daleks.)

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

I know that there are five candidates running for the position of Leader of the UK’s Labour Party, whose result is to be announced tomorrow.

But is there also an election for the position of Deputy Leader, which was narrowly won by Harriet Harman (now in her last 24 hours as acting Leader) back in 2007? Or does she stay on as Deputy until she too resigns?

Usual procedure for book memes: bold if I’ve read it, italics if I’ve started but haven’t finished it, struck through if I couldn’t stand it. Discussion welcome here but probably better directed to Ian Sales’ post here (revised from his original list). Writers are listed from 1 to 55 but there are in fact 77 distinct works. Only six women out of 55, three writers from Northern Ireland, no books post-1995 (I suppose to be a ‘masterwork’ you need to have demonstrated longevity).

1 – The Time Machine, HG Wells (1895)
2 – Last And First Men, Olaf Stapledon (1930)
3 – Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932)
4 – Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell (1949)
5 – The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951)
6 – The Death of Grass, John Christopher (1956)
7 – No Man Friday, Rex Gordon (1956)
8 – The Space-Born, EC Tubb (1956)
9 – On The Beach, Nevil Shute (1957)
10 – WASP, Eric Frank Russell (1958)
11 – A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962)
12 – The Drowned World, JG Ballard (1962)
13 – Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962)
14 – A Man of Double Deed, Leonard Daventry (1965)
15 – A Far Sunset, Edmund Cooper (1967)
16 – The Revolt of Aphrodite [Tunc, Nunquam], Lawrence Durrell (1968 – 1970)
17 – Pavane, Keith Roberts (1968)
18 – Stand On Zanzibar, John Brunner (1968)
19 – Behold The Man, Michael Moorcock (1969)
20 – Ninety-eight Point Four, Christopher Hodder-Williams (1969)
21 – Junk Day, Arthur Sellings (1970)
22 – T-City trilogy [Interface, Volteface, Multiface] Mark Adlard (1971 – 1975)
23 – The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, DG Compton (1973)
24 – Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C Clarke (1973)
25 – Collision with Chronos, Barrington Bayley (1973)
26 – Inverted World, Christopher Priest (1974)
27 – The Centauri Device, M John Harrison (1974)
28 – Hello Summer, Goodbye, Michael G Coney (1975)
29 – Orbitsville [Orbitsville, Orbitsville Departure, Orbitsville Judgement], Bob Shaw (1975 – 1990)
30 – The Alteration, Kingsley Amis (1976)
31 – The White Bird of Kinship [The Road to Corlay, A Dream of Kinship, A Tapestry of Time], Richard Cowper (1978 – 1982)
32 – SS-GB, Len Deighton (1978)
33 – Canopus in Argos: Archives [Shikasta, The Marriages Between Zones 3, 4 and 5, The Sirian Experiments, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire], Doris Lessing (1979 – 1983)
34 – The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, Mostly Harmless], Douglas Adams (1979 – 1992)
35 – Where Time Winds Blow, Robert Holdstock (1981)
36 – The Silver Metal Lover, Tanith Lee (1981)
37 – Cageworld [Search for the Sun!, The Lost Worlds of Cronus, The Tyrant of Hades, Star-Search], Colin Kapp (1982 – 1984)
38 – Helliconia [Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter], Brian W Aldiss (1982 – 1985)
39 – Orthe, Mary Gentle (1983 – 1987)
40 – Chekhov’s Journey, Ian Watson (1983)
41 – In Limbo, Christopher Evans (1985)
42 – Queen of the States, Josephine Saxton (1986)
43 – Wraeththu Chronicles [The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, The Bewitchments of Love and Hate, The Fulfilments of Fate and Desire], Storm Constantine (1987 – 1989)
44 – Code Blue – Emergency!, James White (1987)
45 – Kairos, Gwyneth Jones (1988)
46 – The Empire of Fear, Brian Stableford (1988)
47 – Desolation Road, Ian McDonald (1988)
48 – The Child Garden, Geoff Ryman (1989)
49 – Take Back Plenty, Colin Greenland (1990)
50 – Wulfsyarn, Phillip Mann (1990)
51 – Use of Weapons, Iain M Banks (1990)
52 – Vurt, Jeff Noon (1993)
53 – The Time Ships, Stephen Baxter (1995)
55 – Fairyland, Paul J Mcauley (1995)